By now, retailers are well aware of the need for an increased online presence. We are still in the throes of the pandemic, with new variants affecting business openings and closures every few months. The most reliable way to reach your audience and supercharge sales is still through robust online sales and marketing efforts.

If your business already has a Shopify store up and running, the next step is to find the right audience and develop targeted marketing campaigns to better reach them. For many who are at the beginning stages of their business or even those who are more established, this can seem overwhelming. But with the wealth of digital tools developed over the last decade, it doesn’t have to be.

Segment Your Audience

Before running any marketing campaigns, you first need to identify the most valuable segments of your target audience to reach. Through Shopify’s partnership with AdRoll, Shopify Plus partners get access to AdRoll’s integration that includes a wealth of data capabilities, audience mapping, and customer journey segmentation tools. You can create segments based on audience attributes (e.g. email address, order history) and completed events (e.g. placed item in cart).  After segmenting their audience, AdRoll then allows businesses to generate dynamic ads, personalize campaigns to shopper behavior, analyze metrics, send out email offerings, and more.

Develop Targeted Social Media Advertising

After creating your audience segments, it’s time to target them on the websites that they visit most often. Every business owner knows by now that social media is a great tool to engage with your audience and show off your products and services, but not as many have delved into the world of paid social media advertising.

Promoting your Shopify store on social media through paid ads helps your content reach a broader audience without being dependent upon a newsfeed algorithm. Ad campaigns on social media can benefit from another layer of segmentation such as demographic and interest targeting, which is perfect for brands with target audiences that share specific characteristics (like age, location, gender, and hobbies), or lookalike targeting, which helps reach customers who resemble your existing ones. This type of advertising will soon become the best practice for small businesses and retailers as the online space becomes more competitive.

The next level for businesses is already here. In the ultra-competitive world of e-commerce, small businesses need to equip themselves with the tools necessary to succeed. Whether that’s through advanced audience segmentation and targeting or more robust ad campaigns, AdRoll’s integration with Shopify provides partners with the next step to getting there.